Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull (23 page)

He dropped his father’s box and took the rose stem in one hand, the black thorn aflame in violent light.

He pulled the rose back and pictured it all in his mind - he, the victorious hero, the Treasure of the Ocean in his grasp. The Cromiers defeated, locked behind bars with Aunt Margarita.

The flute song reached a crescendo and the rose’s heat flared up Jim’s arm and into his chest. There was nothing left to stop him.

Jim jabbed the thorn into his left thumb. Drops of blood flowed fast onto the thorn.

The violet light curled back into the rose like a drawn breath. In a great flash it then blasted back out again. The burst of magic left only a wisp of black smoke where the rose had been a moment ago. A white-hot needle of searing pain pierced Jim’s hand and he cried out in agony.

“Oh, Jim, what have you done to yourself?” Lacey cried. Then a great many things happened at once.

A ferocious wind rose up over the sea and whipped across the deck. The Ratts and Lacey, who had already pressed tight up against the railing as they shrunk from the battle, were thrown against Jim harder still. The oak railings, weakened by the magical blast from the rose, cracked. The entire section broke away.

Jim and the others pitched overboard.

Down Jim fell, tumbling end over end toward the water. Lacey screamed somewhere to his right. The Ratts cried out somewhere to his left. Cornelius squawked all about his head. Yet all Jim felt was the blinding pain in his hand - even when his head hit the railing that had fallen before them. The water, whipped by the wind, rose over his face. Even as Jim’s vision turned to black, the burning fire from the black rose thorn coursed through his body and blocked out all else in the world but pain.

ONE

im opened his eyes and found himself lying face first in a pile of wet sand. He coughed violently and spat out a lungful of water. The first thing Jim realized, other than that he was soaked from head to toe, was that his head ached terribly from a nasty bump at his temple. The second thing he realized was that he had no idea where on earth he was. Ocean waves washed onto a yellow sand beach. The shore ran up to a shelf of large boulders. Beyond the rocks, bright green hills rolled inland, dotted with bushes and trees.

Jim pushed himself onto to his hands and knees, wondering if he had just woken from some bizarre dream. He had been in a battle at sea, on a ship amongst a ring of jagged rocks. There had been a black rose, and a voice inside his head urging him to
strike now
. Then he remembered falling - down, down until he hit the water. That was when
he had woken. Jim was just guessing what such a dream might mean when a stabbing pain seared his left thumb. The burning spread into the palm of his hand, where it settled and throbbed.

It had not been a dream after all. The battle and the black rose had been real. The pain in Jim’s hand would have been proof enough, but a few feet away, the broken railing upon which he had struck his head lay half-buried in the sand. Farther beyond the splintered wood, staring back at him with large, frightened eyes, sat Lacey and the Ratts, as soaked with water and caked in sand as Jim.

“Jim, are you alright?” Lacey asked. “Your head hit the rail so hard. I tried to reach you, but the wind was just blowing and blowing the waves. I thought I lost you.”

“Your head sounded like a coconut, mate,” George said, brushing sand out of his face.

“Right,” Peter said. “An empty coconut!” He and Paul laughed between chokes and coughs of seawater.

“Your head must be as hard as George’s to have survived that, Jim,” added Paul.

“Hard as a rock!” George bragged. He smiled and wrapped his knuckles against the side of his noggin. “Me and Jim got heads hard as boulders, don’t we Jim? The hardest heads there are!”

“It’s not a compliment!” Lacey shouted. “Stop making jokes. This is serious.” But George and his brothers were already head-butting each other to test George’s boast and ignoring Lacey entirely.

“Where are we?” Jim asked.

“We, young Morgan, are on an island,” came a caw from above. Cornelius flapped down on the sand between Lacey and Jim. “I’ve just circled it from above, and as far as I can tell, it is indeed the Veiled Island for which we came searching. And it is a much larger island than I thought it might be from the outset.”

“We came through the Devil’s Horns?” Jim asked. He turned on his knees in the sand and looked back at the ocean. Sure enough, sitting not a quarter-mile out in the water, two curved stones rose out of
the sea to form the gate. But not a single other rock, nor the
Spectre
or
Sea Spider
, could be seen at all.

Jim touched the painful spot on the side of his head and furrowed his brow. “I must have been knocked out for hours and hours. The sun was nearly set and it was all but night when we fell overboard. Now it’s early morning. One of you could have at least set me on my back for all that time. I might have drowned!”

“No, Jim,” said Lacey. An anxious wrinkle creased her forehead. “It was morning the moment we came through the Devil’s Horns. You were only unconscious for a moment or two.”

“How is that possible?”

“If this island were simply invisible,” said Cornelius. “The
Spectre
would have crashed into it before we even reached the Devil’s Horns. But this island is at least ten miles across, filled with forests, rocks, fields, and hills. I think this isle is more than just hidden from the eyes of men. I believe it may be its own world entirely. A magic world.”

“Speakin o’ magic,” said George, holding his head for all the head butting he had done with his brothers. “You used some, didn’t you Jim? On the ship, right before we all went tumblin’ down. There was this flash and smoke, and then that wind came up outta nowhere. How did you do that? You never told me you knew any magic! Was Dread Steele givin’ you extra lessons or somethin’?”

“Magic?” Jim said, feigning surprise. But his throat went dry and Lacey and Cornelius’s gazes were suddenly very heavy upon him. So, at last, Jim sighed and confessed the truth.

“I never lost my mother’s necklace,” he said. His eyes drifted down to the sand. He began drilling a hole in it with one of his fingers to keep from meeting his friends’ eyes. “That night, when we came to Morgan Manor and found it all burned to the ground, when I ran away down the beach, there was this old man – a magician or something. He gave me a rose, a magic rose thorn in exchange for the necklace. He said that it would help…he said it would help me get back at the Cromiers for all they’d done to me…to us.”

“Oh, Jim,” Lacey said. Jim felt an unpleasant heat rush up into his face at the disappointment in her voice. Cornelius, however, refused to let Jim hide his eyes. The raven hopped right under Jim’s nose and gave him a black gaze.

“Magic is a dangerous thing, young Morgan. You remember the Vault, do you not? It very nearly killed us both! Then there was the amulet – which tempted you to abandon your friends, and afterwards devoured the King of Thieves whole when it shattered! What possessed you to again take hold of such dark enchantments?”

“Now hold on a sec,” George said, taking up for Jim. “It worked didn’t it? I mean, those stinkers, the Cromiers and that blighter Splitbeard, woulda got on this island and done who knows what if Jim hadn’t done that trick. I just wish you’d a told us, mate, that’s all.” There was a little hurt in George’s voice, but Jim was glad enough to have at least one of his friends on his side.

“It’s supposed to give me the chance to turn the tables on the Cromiers – to get revenge for what they’ve done.”

“Perhaps,” Cornelius said. “But at what cost? For good or for ill, my boy, magic always costs something, doesn’t it? Let us take a look at your hand.”

Jim hesitated, keeping his fist balled up by his side. He was partly afraid to show Cornelius and Lacey, but he even more terrified to look himself.

“Show us, Jim,” Lacey said quietly. Jim pulled his aching hand up from the sand and slowly unfurled his fingers. George sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth. Lacey gasped. Cornelius let out a long caw and even Jim’s stomach sank deep into his gut.

On Jim’s thumb, where the thorn had struck, a deep blight darkened his skin - black as pitch. From the wound, dark tendrils crawled into his palm like vines on a wall.

“Does it hurt?” Lacey asked.

“It hurts something awful,” Jim admitted. “Is it bad, Cornelius?” he asked. For the first time since Jim had known the bird, Cornelius
Darkfeather seemed at a loss for words. He shook his beaked head and ruffled his feathers.

“I don’t know, lad. I don’t know.”

Jim stared hard at his hand with a queasy knot in his stomach. He was about to ask Cornelius if the bird knew any tricks to dull the pain, when loud shouting suddenly echoed down the beach. It was Peter and Paul. The wound momentarily forgotten, Jim, George, and Lacey leapt to their feet and ran toward the hollering. But drawing closer, they heard obnoxious laughter punctuating the shouts and found Peter and Paul leaping in circles around a row of grey rocks in the sand.

“Jim, George!” Peter shouted, laughing at the top of his lungs. “Let’s have another head butting contest!”

“Right,” said Paul. “You two go first and we can know for sure if your heads really are hard as rocks or not.”

Jim had no idea what Peter and Paul were talking about until he approached the stones. The gray rocks were not rocks at all. They were statues - statues of five men running toward the water. Their mouths were stretched into frightened maws. Their eyes were open wide and staring.

“Oh, they’re awful!” Lacey cried. She stepped back from the statues and dropped her gaze to her feet. “Their faces look so real. Who would make such horrible statues?”

“I’ll tell you what’s horrible,” Paul said. “This one’s got a hanger on his nose!” Paul pointed to a bit of moss growing inside one of the statue’s nostrils. Peter, of course, pretended to pick it, which sent George and Paul into hysterics.

“That’s disgusting, Peter!” Lacey shouted.

“It does seem strange, does it not?” Cornelius said, flapping down atop one of the statue’s heads. “Five statues just planted here in the middle of the beach? As I surveyed the island from above I saw no building, temples, or signs of civilization at all. It’s as though these sculptures were crafted, and with great skill I might add, then just left here on their own.”

While the others joked and laughed, an appalling thought struck Jim. His heart dropped like a stone within him. “Stop playing with the statues, right now!” he shouted. “Don’t touch them!”

“Oh, come off it, Jim!” George chided. “They’re just statues.”

“No, they’re not. At least they weren’t. I think…I think they were real people.”

The three Ratts stopped laughing immediately. Peter yanked his hand away from the statue’s nose as though his fingers had been burned. Even Cornelius leapt from statue’s head and flapped to Jim’s shoulder.

“When we were in Shelltown,” Jim continued. “Do you remember what Egidio said about this island? He said it was protected by a curse. He said if you stay on the island for longer than one day and one night, you would be imprisoned here for all time. Don’t you see? These were sailors.” Jim’s mouth went dry as the sand beneath his feet. “This is what happens when you don’t leave the island in time. This is how the island imprisons you forever.”